COE Center on Disability Studies is Selected as a National Center of Excellence to Improve High School Writing Skills

The College of Education Center on Disability Studies (CDS) was one of two national sites awarded a $1.6 million grant from the US Department of Education (US DOE), Office of Special Education Programs (OSEP) to develop and demonstrate the use of tiered approaches to improve writing skills of high school students. The US DOE issued only two of its intended four grants to applicants whose research design met their rigorous standards. With this award, CDS will become a national center of excellence in this area of work. “This is a new area for CDS and required our faculty to develop a highly sophisticated level of expertise in a very short period of time,” said Jean Johnson, Associate Director of CDS.

The project will work within a partnership of CDS researchers with high schools in Windward District on O’ahu and staff at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI, International). The CDS application focused upon the needs of students struggling to write in low performing high schools (undergoing restructuring), including students of cultural minority and low economic status and who speak English as a second language – many of whom are over-identified in special education. During the first year, project researchers will collaborate closely with ninth grade English instructors, writing specialists, and other support personnel to design, develop, and test the feasibility of the model within a typical ninth grade English department.

The project staff will employ “communities of practice” in supporting administrative, curriculum, and teaching personnel, as well as student and parent input into model components and professional development strategies. This approach, applied in a number of CDS projects in Hawai‘i’s public schools ensures the “fit” of new evidence-based innovations within the school, department, and classroom instructional context.  The project will implement a research-evaluation design, documenting the fidelity of the model strategies, and collect critical teacher-student outcome and follow-up data.

CDS Director, Robert Stodden, led the successful grant development team of Jeanne Bauwens, Norma Jean Stodden, Thomas Christ, Kiriko Takahashi, Kelly Roberts, Eric Folk, and Danielle Delise.